Pardon Edward Snowden

The poet Mark McCain received an e-mail, which had been sent to numerous American poets, inviting him to sign a “poetition” requesting that President Barack H. Obama pardon Edward Snowden. The request took the form of a poem written by Merrill Jensen, whom Mark knew to be twenty-eight years old, a full nine years his junior. The poem-petition rhymed “Snowden” with “pardon.” And “pardon” with “Rose Garden.” And “Rose Garden” with “nation.” And “nation” with “Eden.” It rhymed—or, as Mark preferred to put it, it echoed—“Putin” and “boot in” and “Clinton” and “no disputing.” “Russia” echoed “U.S.A.”; and “U.S.A.” “Thoreau”; and “Thoreau” “hero.”

Mark forwarded the e-mail to the poet E. W. West. He wrote:

Am I crazy to find this enraging?
Within seconds Liz wrote back:

No.

They arranged to have coffee that afternoon.

In preparation for the meeting, Mark tried to organize his thoughts. His first point, of course, was that the very idea of poem as petition was misconceived. A poem was first and last a Ding an sich. It definitely wasn’t a message that boiled down to a single political-humanitarian demand. It made no sense for an agreeing multitude, or mob, to undersign a poem: you could no more agree with a poem than with a tree, not even if you’d written it. Of course, the signers of the poetition would argue that they were associating themselves with the text’s petitionary substance and not with its formal properties; and that in any case poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes its scabbard. But, accepting all that, Mark mentally counterclaimed, why not just have a petition in the form of a petition? Why drag the poem into the muck? Well, the undersigned might reply, a versified petition was likely to attract more attention and be more consequential than the alternative. To which Mark would answer, The good of poetry resides not in the—

He began to feel a familiar dialectical dizziness. He set off to meet his friend, even though it meant that he would get there twenty minutes early.

Liz was waiting for him when he arrived.

They hugged. The moment they took their seats, Liz said, “Well, are you going to sign it?”

Mark said, “I don’t know. Are you?”

Liz said, “Not my problem. Nobody’s asked me to.”

Mark paused. This was a complexity he ought to have foreseen. With extravagant bitterness, he said, “Oh, they’ll rope you in.”

Liz mused, “I did a reading with Merrill in January.”

Mark had attended the event, as Liz well knew. “I felt bad for him,” he told her. “You really showed him up. Without meaning to, of course.” He went on, “Look, I do think this thing is chaotic. They’re basically shooting out e-mails at random. And I don’t think Merrill is a vengeful, petty guy. Far from it. I think his heart’s in the right place. Ish. But you know what? I could be wrong. He’s obviously interested in a certain kind of success.” Mark stopped there and was glad he had, even though he loathed Merrill Jensen. Whenever he bad-mouthed a colleague, however justifiably, he invariably regretted it. (Strange, just what a draining effort of tact was required to get through the day without bad-mouthing another poet.) In this instance, he felt, he hadn’t thrown Merrill Jensen under the bus. He’d dissed him only in order to express solidarity with Liz, and only to that extent.

Liz doubted that Merrill had overlooked her because she’d shown him up at their reading; in all probability, Merrill’s recollection was that he’d shown her up. No, she had been overlooked because she was a woman. Whenever a stand needed to be taken and the attention of the public needed to be endured, the peacocks huffed and squawked to the fore en masse, idiotically iridescent.

She decided to say, “We need people like Merrill. Somebody’s got to be interested in being prominent. Otherwise we’d all disappear.”

Mark said, “I expect Dylan has been contacted.”

Liz laughed. The singer’s Nobel Prize in Literature had bothered her, yes. Literature was in the first place reading matter, after all, and Dylan’s lyrics were mostly unreadable—and not even listenable to without the music. Even his supposedly best stuff would be torn apart if presented to the poetry practicum she taught every Tuesday, not only on account of its wordy, clichéd, hyperactive figuration but, more fundamentally, because of the soothsaying persona that the singer so readily deployed, a trope that worked fine in a pop song but on paper came off as a shtick. All that said, Liz had not taken the news as a personal hit. Mark, though, in common with many men of the pen she knew, had been knocked flat. For two days he had not been able to leave his apartment or even to post on Facebook. Only after this period of grieving had he managed to discuss the matter with Liz, at the same table where they now sat. At that meeting, Mark had reported that the night before he’d found himself thinking back to the seventeen-year-old who, wandering the public library of Forsyth, Missouri, inexplicably leafed through a tattered Norton Anthology and for the first time came truly face to face with a poem’s mysterious verb-visage. He still remembered the one that did it for him—Roethke’s “The Waking,” funnily enough. So take the lively air, / And, lovely, learn by going where to go, he recited to Liz. And that was the moment he’d set off on a delightful clueless journey in language, and for years he never once felt lonely or even singular, because at all times he felt this breeze, he said to Liz, on which the poems he would read and write might be accepted and held firmly aloft, and the air of the culture seemed filled with such breezes and such poems. Yes, Liz said, I know exactly what you mean. Frank O’Hara did it for me, she said. Which one? Mark asked. She said, “Animals,” to which Mark replied, We didn’t need speedometers / we could manage cocktails out of ice and water, and Liz wanted to hug her friend. Anyhow, Mark continued, the damn thing is, it’s so hard to keep believing. And there’s so much you need to believe in. Does that make sense to you? It does, Liz said. Mark said, You become aware that what you’re doing is almost nothing. That it’s just a few atoms away from nothing. And now, with this scandal, I feel that what we do is in fact nothing. I feel like it’s officially nothing. Liz saw that Mark had other things he planned to say but was too emotional to speak. Liz, they’re calling him a poet, he finally got out. You know? They’re not calling him a novelist. They’re not calling him a songwriter. They’re saying he’s a poet, Liz. I know, sweetie, Liz had said.

“Seems like he’s finally accepted the honor,” she now stated.

Mark said, “Of course he accepted it. A guy with that much vanity? He was always going to accept it.”

In fact, during the couple of weeks that Dylan had not responded to the news of his award, Mark had hoped that the singer would tell the Swedish buffoons where to stick it; that Bob had the integrity to recognize that an ultra-celebrated multimillionaire who deals in concerts and extra-paginal iconicity is not playing the same game as a writer who sits down in a small college town and, with no prospect of meaningful financial reward, tries to come up with a handful of words that will, unless something untoward should happen, be read by a maximum of a hundred and forty people and be properly appreciated by maybe fifty-two of these, of whom maybe six will be influenced. Make that two. Once a year, a small beam of honor, reflected all the way from Stockholm, faintly brightened the dim endeavors of such writers. And now even this glimmer had been removed from their small and dark corner of the sky and tossed like a trinket into Bob Dylan’s personal constellation.

This sidereal imagery made Mark uneasy—stars were almost always cheesy; doubly cheesy, in the context of a “pop star”—but he had nothing else. Language was hard. And poetry, he’d always felt, was language at its hardest.

He had recently expressed this point of view to his friend Jarvis, a writer of short-form fiction. Jarvis said, “Really? Poetry is hard, sure. But good prose is just as hard, man.”

“Poets can generally do what prose writers do,” Mark, a little drunk, declared. “The reverse? Not so much.”

A day later, he received an e-mail from Jarvis with a poem attached:

Easy Peasy

It seems that what’s

Keeping what is as it is, the whole thing thing, is physics, whatever

That is. Let’s see: the fizz of the river, l’hiver, that Swiss

Watch thing. Liver.

Every frisson, everything that’s

Alive or that was once aliver. The leaf. The leaver.

He forwarded this to Liz:

What do you think?
She wrote back:

So great that you’re writing again! This is good—best thing you’ve done in a while. So effortless. “Physics” and “fizz” is a pleasure. And don’t think I haven’t noticed that the English-language contractions erase “i” and “u.” In a poem drowning in materialism, that’s just such a smart, playful way to raise the issue of subjectivity.

Mark didn’t get back to Liz. Or to Jarvis.

Re the Dylan Nobel, Liz said, “It’s depressing. I can’t separate it from the Trump phenomenon.”

He kept secret, even from Liz, the fact that he’d already written on this question. It was a secret because what he’d written wasn’t a poem. For some months, Mark had worked surreptitiously, and exclusively, on a series of prose reflections that he termed “pensées.”

How doable pensées were! The most difficult thing about making a poem, in Mark’s judgment, was figuring out the text’s relation to its own knowledge; figuring out, to quote from Liz’s one anthologized work, the poem’s “claim to saying.” There was no such problem with a pensée: you wrote as a know-all. Apparently—and here Nietzsche and Cioran and above all Adorno were Mark’s masters—the trick was to simply put to one side all epistemological difficulties and just steam ahead into the realm of assertion and opinion and emphasis. Boy, it felt good. With great gusto Mark had knocked out, apropos of the hypercapitalistic reader:

This results from a state of affairs in which one’s autonomy consists primarily in a freedom to consume. Objective realities are inspected like supermarket apples and accepted only if they tickle the fancy. If they don’t, it’s not sufficient merely to reject the apple. The apple tree itself must be cut down. And then the orchard. Hell hath no fury like a consumer inconvenienced.

In this way, shopping is confused with resistance; a bogus egalitarianism prevails; a vicious man-on-the-streetism becomes dominant. The tricoteuses make their return, clicking not needles but touch pads. Need one add that the poem is the first to be dragged to the guillotine?

Who knew that writing this stuff would be such fun? The voice—at once pedantic and forceful, and strangely aged and pampered—was the most fun of all. It was the voice of the irritable Central European professor whose wife’s principal domestic project is to insure that her husband enjoys peace and quiet in his study.

Mark had not had a wife or a study in six years. Liz and he became close during the chaos of his divorce, when he was outed as a cuckold and outed from his house. His male friends, he was a little shocked to learn, were ineffectual, indiscreet, and bizarrely merciless confidants. Liz listened to him sympathetically—and honestly, too. When Mark said to her, I was blindsided, Liz said, Yeah, maybe, and he said, What do you mean, maybe? and Liz said, Quarterbacks are blindsided. You weren’t blindsided. You were myopic.

Liz’s criticism of Mark’s poetry was similarly sensitive and forthright, and he was very grateful for it and happy to reciprocate. Her work wasn’t right up his alley—it was a bit too academic and sexual—but there was no querying its intelligence and carefulness. In any case, Mark mistrusted his own alley, which at this point, as he’d remarked to Liz, was overrun by the rats of resentment. And the cats of confusion, Liz suggested. Not to mention the dogs of disillusionment.

If Mark envied Liz at all, it was for the growing kudos that E. W. West enjoyed as a writer who disturbed edifices of gender and sexuality. But it wasn’t Liz’s fault that her biologically and culturally determined homoerotic inclinations were now in vogue, just as it could hardly be held against her that she’d grown up in bourgeois luxury on the Upper West Side of New York City. (Liz often complained to Mark about finding herself in Virginia, a dislocation that she experienced, as any reader of her “Sappho in Sicily” quickly grasped, as an exile.) Nor did he hold it against Liz that, in an unpublicized complication of her biographical profile, she was for the first time romantically involved with a man. His name was Pickett, apparently as a tribute to Wilson Pickett. Did anyone call their children after poets anymore? Mark doubted that there’d ever be a kid named McCain out there in the world. Or, if there were, the kid would certainly be named for the political weasel John McCain. Mark had long felt defamed by this echo.

Every word is a prejudice, Nietzsche famously points out. One might add: Every word prejudices. Nowhere is this truer than in the nominal realm. One’s name cannot be separated from one’s good name.

He cared deeply for Liz and was her biggest fan and cheerleader. He felt bad that she had not been contacted about the Snowden poetition.

“So what should I do?” he asked her. “Sign it? Rewrite it?”

“Ah,” Liz said. “The patriarch’s quandary.”

Mark did the work of smiling sympathetically. He saw that Liz was peeved, and hurt, and with good cause. The problematic situation of women was not to be underestimated, not that Liz was in danger of committing this error. In her most recent sonnet, “mandate” had been displaced by the neologism “womandate.” Now Liz was, as she liked to say, lady-pissed. Mark totally got it.

But in the meantime he had a problem of his own, and an itch to explore the problem in writing. They had finished their coffees and their refills. It was time to go.

The two friends stepped outside. It was a lovely November afternoon. They hugged and separately went off.

As soon as he got back to his apartment, he wrote:

We attribute to Bertrand Russell the following notion, that to acquire immunity from eloquence is of utmost importance for citizens of a democracy. We are curious about the notion because Stevens was. And we connect Russell’s statement, thanks to Denis Donoghue, to this one, by Locke: “I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind, since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred.”

If we grant Russell’s words a merely provisional validity, we can ask: What is a verse petition if not fallacious eloquence? What is poetry if not a riposte to the forces of fallaciousness? What are these forces if not power’s language?

Mark wondered if he should explain that, by “fallacy,” Locke meant “deception.” He decided not to. The reader would connect the dots.

Not for the first time, Mark asked himself who this notional reader was. He had never, not once, met a disinterested party who had even heard of his poetry, never mind read any of it. Maybe his pensées would gain him a reader he could physically touch.

He felt a wavelet of nausea. The feeling had a certain etymological justice: he had jumped from one ship to another. But what was the alternative? Write nothing? It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry.

Mark wrote:

How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.
Then:

Sometimes I sit down to write and feel the internal presence of . . . bad faith. Therefore I desist from writing. On the other hand, what would it mean to write in good faith? That sounds even more suspect.
He ate a cheese sandwich with mustard and olive oil. That was dinner. He went to his armchair. He wrote:

It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.

Now it was dark out. Usually the poet would read a book, but tonight he lacked the wherewithal. He opened a can of beer and went online. For a while he skipped from one site to another. Everything was either about the election or not about the election. He checked his e-mail. Nothing new. Then he went on Facebook, then back to skipping around the Internet. He found himself reading, without interest but with close attention, about persimmon farmers in Florida. He rechecked his e-mail. Hello, Merrill had written him again.

Actually, Merrill had written Merrill—Mark had been bcc’d. The e-mail brought “exciting news”: funding had been secured (from whom, Merrill didn’t say) to buy half a page in the Times for the poetition. This moves the needle, Merrill stated.

Mark’s reaction involved three thoughts. One: “Move the needle”? Two: What an operator Merrill Jensen was. What a maestro of fallacy. Mark knew for a fact that Merrill not only disliked Bob Dylan’s lyrics but also disliked Bob Dylan’s songs, which he’d once sneeringly characterized to Mark, who did like them, as “Pops’ music.” But, sure enough, the minute the Nobel was announced, the prick was at the forefront of the congratulators and imprimatur-givers, arguing that Bob Dylan was an unacknowledged legislator of the world; ergo, Bob Dylan was a poet. It made Mark want to puke: the pseudo-reasoning, so right wing in its dishonesty; and the big lie that Dylan somehow lacked acknowledgment. The big truth, not that anyone dared to mention it, was that Shelley’s dictum needed to be revised. Poets were the unacknowledged poets of the world.

Had Mark been among the scores of writers contacted by the media for their reaction to the prize—which he hadn’t been—he would have spoken up for his comrades in verse. He would have faced down the wrathful online barbarians who vilified any perceived anti-Dylanite. (Their favorite disparagement, tellingly, was the epithet “nobody.”) He would have stated:

The status of poet is not to be worn like one of those fine ceremonial gowns sported by recipients of honorary degrees for a single, sunny, glorious afternoon. Not even by Bob Dylan. If there is such as thing as a poet’s mantle, it is a $4.99 plastic poncho: useless for fashion but good in the rain and the cold. And in an emergency.

His third thought about Merrill’s e-mail was that his name had never appeared in the Times and that if he signed the poetition it would.

His apartment was on the third floor of a Victorian only minimally maintained by its owner. There was a bedroom and a kitchen-living room equipped with an armchair, a desk, a desk lamp, a small sofa, and bookcases that entirely covered two walls. No television. There were two windows. When Mark wanted to pace about the apartment, his one option was to walk to and from these windows. This he now did.

It was a journey that he’d made thousands of times, and thousands of times he had viewed the shingled rooftops of the houses across the street, and, beyond them, in the town’s small business district, two brown glassy towers. At night, you couldn’t see much beyond the glare of the street light directly in front of the window. And yet evidently there was an inextinguishable need to approach an opening built into a wall for air and light, and to look through it.

Somebody down there was walking a dog. That was a poem, right there—the master, the leash, the joyful dog, etc. But the territory had been covered: there was that Nemerov poem, just for starters. And the one by Heather McHugh, with that all-time-great dog line—doctor of crotches. A poem by Mark McCain would be water poured into a vessel that was already full: superfluous.

He kept looking, which was another poem—a poem about the peculiar percipience of the one who gazes out a window. The poem would do for the window what theorists had done for the threshold: it would offer the idea of the fenestral as a consort to the idea of the liminal. He wouldn’t write it. The automatic metaphoric associativity of “the window” was just too much. He could always play with the associations, of course. But surely there had to be better things to do than play with the associations of “the window.”

He returned to his chair and wrote, in less than half an hour, a poem that deviated from his previous work. The poem masqueraded as notes for a possible poem. It was titled “Meditation on What It Means to Write?” It read:

Problem: “a meditation on” is a cliché. “What it means to” is a cliché.

The very notion of a problem, colon, is a cliché.

“The very notion of” is a cliché.

“Cliché” strikes one as a cliché.

As does “strikes one.”

And “As does.”

Ditto inverted commas.

Ditto “ditto.”

He did not write Merrill back. He did not put his name to the poetition.

As soon as he had not done these things, he rose up from his chair. He went not to the window but to the area between the chair and the sofa. He stood there with hands balled into shaking fists. Silently and exultantly he roared, Never give in. Never not resist. ♦